Charge to the
Synod of the Diocese of Edinburgh
by The
Bishop of Edinburgh,
St Mary’s
Cathedral, Palmerston Place, Edinburgh
11th
March 2000 (11.30 a.m.)
INTRODUCTION
This is
the last occasion on which I shall deliver the formal address to the Diocese of
Edinburgh that is described as 'the charge'; and I want to use it to talk
theology. What I am alleged to believe
or disbelieve is frequently commented on in the correspondence columns of the
newspapers; so I thought it might save both my critics and supporters some
guesswork if I summarised my theological position before I saddle up and ride
off into the sunset. Like all the best
sermons, what I have to say will have three parts. Part one will be about that mystery we call God; part two will be
about that collection of ancient documents we call the New Testament; and part
three will be about the Church.
THE
MYSTERY OF GOD
Among
theologians there are reckoned to be three approaches to the mystery we call
God. I am using that little word to
express a response to the question: 'Is there an originating reality behind the
universe that transcends and sustains it?'
There are three approaches towards the existence of this possible
transcendence: naive realism, non-realism and critical realism. Let me try to expound the differences by
reference to a passage in the Book of
Exodus, where Moses hears God speaking to him from the burning bush and is
commissioned to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. What was the nature of the mysterious reality that lay behind
that encounter? The naive realist would
say that God actually entered the burning bush and spoke human words to Moses
in his own tongue. The non-realist
would say that nothing was happening outside Moses' own mind. What was going on was a projection onto an
imagined external reality of the struggle in Moses unconscious over how he
should respond to the oppression of his people in Egypt. The naive realist says there was something
outside Moses and it spoke to him; the non-realist says there was nothing
outside Moses and that he was really just talking to himself.
The
position of the critical realist is less easy to define or describe. If we imagine the responses to my original
question as a semicircular dial, with non-realism at the extreme left and naive realism at the extreme right,
then critical realism would find itself bang in the centre, at a ninety degree
angle to the base line of the semicircle.
As with all of these things, there are degrees of difference within all
the broad categories. Critical realism
would hold that there is a transcendent reality, but that it is encountered by
humans in ways that are relative to their place in the universe. In the case of Moses, the critical realist
would argue that he had a genuine encounter with God, but that it came to him
in the form it did because that was the arena in which his own struggles were
taking place. This position is called 'critical' realism, because it believes
that it is necessary to put religious claims to careful examination and
interpretation. This is how John Hick
puts it: 'Religious experience occurs
in many different forms, and the critical realist interpretation enables us to
see how these may nevertheless be different authentic responses to the
Real. But they may also not be. They may instead be human
self-delusion. Or they may be a mixture
of both. And so a critical stance in
relation to them is essential'.
No matter
which position we adopt, there is a difficulty that affects them all. There is
an ancient paradox in philosophy called the paradox of appearance: is there a world out there independent of
our perception of it? Common sense
would suggest to us that there is; but the fact remains that we can only know
that world through our perception of it.
It is our mind, the recording device between our ears, that puts us in
touch with what is out there and plays it back for us. There is no view from nowhere that could
establish its independent existence for us apart from our perception of
it. So there is a sense in which it is true to say that it is our mind that
calls the world into being for us, along with everything else, including
God. There is no satisfactory way out
of this paradox. If there is God and a
world out there, we can only know them, understand them, be in touch with them,
through the agency of our own perceptions.
This promotes in me neither despair at ever being able to get hold of
anything outside my own head, nor the kind of immobilising scepticism that
believes nothing is knowable as it is in itself. What it does compel me to accept is the powerful creativity of
human consciousness in the act of knowing anything, including God. If you accept that principle, it rules out
the possibility of pure or naive realism, because it fails to take into account
the contribution we ourselves make to any kind of encounter with reality.
As far as
the status of God is concerned, I find the needle on my own dial set midway
between non-realism and critical-realism.
I cannot return to an understanding of religious claims that is
pre-critical; but I am not prepared to reduce the whole of religious experience
to human projection, though much of it clearly is. I am haunted by the strangeness of the universe, by its
sacredness as well as by its obviousness. From to time I have crossed invisible
thresholds into other dimensions of reality.
Another way to put this is to say that I believe in God. I find myself encountered by a depth in life
that religions call the sacred or the transcendent. I also believe that Jesus of Nazareth was possessed by that
mystery with a force that still reverberates today. So let me turn, next, to the New Testament.
THE NEW
TESTAMENT
When it
comes to the interpretation of the New Testament, the same three
approaches apply. Some people adopt an attitude of naive
realism to the text, some an attitude of non-realism and some the attitude I
have called critical realism.
Unfortunately, most of our people seem to be unaware of the range of
approaches to the bible. They think
that the only possible attitude for a Christian to adopt to the New Testament
is that of total and uncritical acceptance of everything in it, so they are
scandalised when they hear that there are different ways of interpreting the text. Then there are the people who dismiss
Christianity as a primitive mentality that is impossible for an educated person
today. Significantly, they despise any
religious thinker who tries to offer a contemporary approach to the faith and
the scriptures on which it is based.
'The ones with real faith', they say of the naive realists, 'go on
believing the impossible things we have rejected. They are magnificently deluded, but honest. As for the
theologians who are trying to interpret faith in ways that are consistent with
contemporary understanding, these we despise, especially if they are
Bishops'. Most New Testament scholars
today would support neither of these approaches to the New Testament. They adopt an attitude of critical realism
to the text. They believe that the New
Testament puts us in touch with transcendent reality, but it has been mediated
through human communities that have had a profound effect on its shape and
content, so it requires careful interpretation.
Two great
principles have been established by scholars in their interpretation of the New
Testament today, though there are inevitable differences in their
application. The first is that the
early Church had an enormous part in shaping the written tradition that has
come down to us, so we have to discriminate between what comes from the Church
and what comes directly from Jesus. Let
me use the Fourth Gospel as an example. Raymond Brown, the Catholic scholar who
died last year, was a man of enormous reverence who was deeply conservative in
his attitude to Christian tradition. We know that Christianity began as a
movement within Judaism, from which it gradually and painfully separated. Brown believed that the Fourth Gospel
reflects the theology of one Christian community during those days of struggle,
which accounts for its strong and fateful denunciations of 'the Jews', as
though they were generic enemies of Jesus, rather than the community from which
he and his earliest followers came. When
we read John we are listening to the magnificent meditation of a Christian
group that has just separated, with much bitterness and mutual recrimination,
from the local Jewish community. Understanding the gospel in that way, we can
put its claims, as well as its strange omissions, in historical perspective.
The other
principle that is broadly accepted today is that much of the material in the
New Testament is not history remembered, but prophecy historicised. This is a much more difficult principle for
us to get hold of, because we would consider it dishonest to create stories in
order to fulfil scriptural prophecies.
But the biblical writers did not write abstract theology, they told
stories that were heavy with symbolism.
They did not offer theories to prove that Jesus was the fulfilment of
the old Israel, they crafted narratives that put him right in the middle of its
history. This is an ancient religious
technique that we still practise today. C.S.Lewis' Screwtape Letters is a
good example. If you were ignorant of
Christian history and came across a copy of this book five hundred years hence,
you might get into an argument about whether the letters were really written by
one devil to another, when what you ought to look for is its theological
meaning. Once we grasp this literary
distinction it gets us out of a number of dead-end controversies. For example, the birth narratives in Matthew
and Luke are inconsistent with each other; they can't both be historically
true. But what if neither is making
historical claims, but both are making theological points about the
significance of Jesus? Then they can
both be right.
Scholars
debate endlessly about these matters, but the point I am trying to establish is
that scriptural interpretation is much more dynamic and exciting than simple
literalism. By depriving our people of
insight into the different approaches to biblical interpretation, because we
are afraid of upsetting them, we are driving others out of the Church who
mistakenly believe that naive realism is the only approach on offer. I have
little doubt that this is one of the most significant issues confronting the
church today; and the way we respond to it will determine the fate of
Christianity in the complex and sophisticated culture of northern Europe in the
Twenty First Century. Let me now turn
to the final part of this address and talk about today's church.
THE CHURCH
Aaron
Copland said that we were in need of a usable past. Since we live our lives forwards and understand them backwards,
it helps us to make our journey if we have maps from the past to guide us. These maps are the traditions of our
forebears, which tell us how they made their journey and understood its
meaning. Societies which have achieved
stability and duration inculcate acceptance of a common view of things, a group
narrative that interprets and directs every aspect of the human journey. The philosopher Nietzsche had many
illuminating things to say about this process;
he wrote: 'History teaches that the best-preserved tribe among a people
is the one in which most men have a living communal sense as a consequence of
sharing their customary and indisputable principles - in other words, in
consequence of a common faith.'
Nietzsche then goes on to offer one of his most brilliant insights. 'The danger to these strong communities
founded on homogeneous individuals who have character is growing stupidity,
which is gradually increased by heredity, and which, in any case, follows all
stability like a shadow. It is the
individuals who have fewer ties and are much more uncertain and morally weaker
upon whom spiritual progress depends in such communities; they are the men who
make new and manifold experiments; they loosen up and from time to time inflict
a wound on the stable element of a community.
Precisely in this wounded and weakened spot the whole structure is
inoculated, as it were, with something new; but its over-all strength must be
sufficient to accept this new element into its blood and assimilate it. Those who degenerate are of the highest
importance wherever progress is to take place; every great progress must be
preceded by a partial weakening. The
strongest natures hold fast to the type; the weaker ones
help to develop it further'.
It is
important to understand the use of the terms degenerate and morally
weak in that quotation. There is
usually a strong undercurrent of irony in Nietzsche, so we probably ought to
understand the terms from the point of view of the strong guardians of the
tradition in question. In Nietzschean
language, the strongest natures will have absorbed the tradition most
completely and will practise it unselfconsciously. From their point of view, any questioning of the tradition and
any weakness in fulfilling it will be defined as degeneracy and
corruption. We have all encountered
exemplars of powerful traditions, of both the strong and stupid types. There is the strong conservative male,
perhaps a high-ranking officer in a uniformed profession, who has completely
internalised the tradition that bred him and repeatedly risked his life in its
defence. Men like this would die for
the protection of the system that has produced them and of which they are the
highest type. People who find
themselves in these guardian roles usually have a high practical intelligence,
but they are rarely reflective or open to doubt; there may even be a strong
genetic pre-disposition in them to the unquestioning acceptance of system and
order. They are often intolerant of
reformers, whom they usually dismiss with colourful contempt. Further down the chain of authority from
these strong types we find the truly stupid members of traditional
communities. They are usually rather
shallow beneficiaries of the prevailing system who do little to protect or
extend it, apart from offering it their uncomprehending benediction.
One of the
many paradoxes of human development is illuminated here. The duration of a tradition is important to
societies that prize stability and continuity, but the price they pay may be a
level of stagnation that ends by threatening the safety of the tradition
itself, because they inhibit its evolution and development. The strong types can become fundamentalists
whose resistance to change puts the tradition itself at risk. Nietzsche's insight here is that it is precisely
those who deviate from the tradition, because of their proneness to doubt and
reflection, who provide the means for its development and continuance. The very people who are persecuted for their
heresy may be the agents that preserve whatever is enduringly sound in the
tradition in question. A deeper aspect
of the same paradox is that the founders who become the passionate focus
of fundamentalist loyalty in a later era
were almost always heretics in their original context, as was certainly the case
with Jesus.
The point I am making here is that all institutions, including the
church, need strong conservatives to protect and transmit their traditions; but
they also need the constant challenge of radicals who help it adapt to
necessary change and thereby preserve it from stupidity and stagnation. This creates a painful tension in the
institution, but that very tension is evidence of life. Holding the balance between stability and
change requires maturity and magnanimity from all the protagonists in these
struggles. The Anglican Communion was
once notable for this kind of balance, but it seems to be under threat
today. Two Bishops were recently
ordained by the Archbishops of Singapore and Uganda with the intention, to use
an analogy from the Archbishop of Canada, of firing them like nuclear missiles
into the Episcopal Church of the United States, because the Archbishops in
question disapprove of the American church.
I want to focus on only one aspect of the dispute. If they do not withdraw their threat, these
two Archbishops will cause schism, the break up of the body of the Church. Schism is always a temptation for enraged
traditionalists, who cannot endure the pain of living in communities that
struggle with change. When the American
church ordained women a quarter of a century ago there was a move among
Anglo-Catholics to go into schism, because they could not accept the heretical
new development. A friend of mine
called Bob Terwilliger, who was
Suffragan Bishop of Dallas at the time, and an implacable opponent of women's
ordination, argued against the move with a striking insight. He said that schism was a greater sin for
Christians than heresy. To use a medical
metaphor, heresy is a virus that afflicts but does not kill the body, whereas schism
tears it apart. To commit schism is
like curing a migraine by cutting off the patient's head. To endure what you think is heresy, and
struggle with charity to keep the body intact, is always the wiser course. And history cautions us to remember that
today's heresy may become tomorrow's accepted practice. We know this from our own experience as well
as from reading the New Testament. One
of the weaknesses of the Anglican Communion today is that some of its provinces
lack the experience of living with disagreement, rather than breaking up over
it, because they are theologically homogeneous. The only time they encounter significant difference is when they
read about what's happening in other countries. Anglicanism will endure as an international communion only if
these provinces learn to practice theological magnanimity.
So far,
the Scottish Episcopal Church has managed to model that kind of generous
inclusiveness, though not without cost.
It is my prayer that this will continue to be our strongest
characteristic, not only for our own sake, but for the sake of the life of
Scotland. One of the disquieting
consequences of our new parliament has been the way some of the Christian
regiments in the country have been training their guns on it, as though there
was only one way to deal with the complex issues that face us. Most Scots do not go to church and many of
them are alarmed by the tone of harsh intolerance that comes from the mouth of
Cardinal Winning, who has become the voice of traditionalist Christianity in
the new Scotland. Against that
turbulent background, it will become increasingly important for our church to
use the language of compassion and understanding as we wrestle with the
complexities of the human condition.
That, I believe, has become our vocation at the beginning of this new
century and I pray that we will fulfil it with grace and charity.
PERSONAL
NOTE
Let me end this long address
on a personal note. It is an enormous
honour to be your Bishop. I know that
there have been times when I have angered some of you and times when I have
exasperated all of you. I guess I was
born without the inhibitor that normal people have as part of their standard
equipment, and it's too late now to apply for genetic surgery. In spite of the occasional turbulence
between us, I hope you all realise that I have loved you. Thank you and amen.
Please sign my guestbook and
view it.
Statistics courtesy of WebCounter.